A very important aspect of my work for me has nothing to do with games, or stories or any sort of meaning. It’s actually an attempt at expressing a love for reality. Reality how I find it, how I observe it. Not reality as in truth, or How Things Really Are. But the much more modest every day wonders of existence on this planet.

A fleck of dust that flies up when I pass by, the way our hallway smells of wood, the light playing with the leaves of the trees in the park, rain drops sinking into warm stone tiles, a blackbird perched on the highest chimney in the street singing its strangely random tune, the sound of church bells on Sunday morning.

And it’s not even because of the beauty of these things. It’s much more basic. It’s a sort of love, with a touch of grattitude perhaps. That’s what motivates most of my work: to pay homage to reality as it exists, to existence itself, freed from meaning, from purpose. And yes, in my work, I think the love I feel for reality is translated in the attempt to create beauty. But beauty was not the driving force, merely an expression of love.

This is probably why I like realtime 3D so much. It’s the technology that is best equipped to create reality in. Not just how things look, but the events in their entirety, what they feel like, and how things respond to my presence. One of my greatest joys in Bientôt l’été, for instance is to run towards the seagulls standing at the shoreline and make them fly away. It’s such a real thing, such an understandable thing. We know this to be a manifestation of life on earth. If the gulls would not fly away, it would feel weird -or if we would not feel inclined to run towards them, equally so, perhaps.

There’s no message here, no meaning. Just a love for reality.

This might be a very busy time in the project, preparing a build of Bientôt l’été for IndieCade. But it’s also an easy time. Finally I have a sense of what this game will be. And I’m just working to implement everything needed for that to become a reality.

I have a long but very concrete to do list. So I’m just going down the list. Easy! It feels comfortable to know what I am doing, for a change. Not that there’s no new issues to deal with all the time. But it’s different from not knowing what you’re making at all and doubting everything.

I don’t think I like prototyping very much. The uncertainty that comes with it is unpleasant. I know it’s important to have a healthy measure of doubt when you’re creating. But in truth, I much prefer to just make something and risk utter failure, than to break my head over how to do it right. But then again, I have been known to do things that I didn’t like doing too. I’m kind of obsessed with getting results. The idea that the journey would be more important than the destination, is not something I adhere to much in my work.

So, yes, I know what Bientôt l’été is going to be. It’s a strange project. On the one hand, it’s a very modest and quaint little art game. There’s not much going on, neither in terms of story or in terms of play. And yet, on the other, it’s very rich. There’s a single player part and a online dual player part. There’s lots of text, all voice acted by two actors, and subtitled in three languages. There’s beautiful music. There’s two fully developed 3D interactive animated characters. You can choose your avatar. I still want to make an iPad extension to the game. And there’s a whole solar system, of course.

This looks like a list of disparate elements. But it all hangs together very well, I find. The fact that some aspects of previously unfinished projects have snuck in probably helps my confidence. It feels like we’re building something that we have been wanting to make for a while. I look forward to playing it!

I got up way too early this morning. Couldn’t sleep any more. Kept thinking about the work on Bientôt l’été. It’s a bit of a crunch period at the moment as we’re trying to get a presentable work-in-progress version of the game ready for IndieCade‘s late deadline on Monday.

I’m not the only one working hard. Walter Hus is delivering new music tracks at rocket speeds. Laura Raines Smith is animating the dressed characters out of Texas, while Auriea is modelling their undressed version here. Our very first intern Daniel Hellweg is working on the café table at the moment. And Theresa Schlag is taking care of the architecture. And even outside of Tale of Tales, somewhere in Russia, Universe programmer Neodrop is studying a troubled system from Bientôt l’été in an attempt to improve the performance of their wonderful visual programming tool.

This busily buzzing little hive adds quite a bit on my plate. I need to communicate with collaborators and evaluate the assets that come in, in between adding the final essential features to the programming and making the whole thing run acceptably. But they’re delivering such good stuff that I’m happy to interrupt my work for it. And after each such occasion, the game looks and sounds a little bit better.

Bientôt l’été is starting to feel very nice. Once in a while, I get a glimpse of what it can do. I’m beginning to see it, to understand its potential. Like vaguely deciphering the silhouette in the mist of a person I would like to know better. But I don’t have time to really sit down with it. And when I try, there’s always this or the other thing that urgently needs fixing. Hopefully the build for IndieCade will be playable enough to evaluate (and perhaps do some much needed playtesting).

When I look at Bientôt l’été I know it’s not going to make a lot of sense to many people. And I feel a bit weird about feeling concerned about this.

I remember when I was younger, in the 1980s, we took pride in being original. We liked that our work was confusing to people. We wanted to be special, to be different. To be misunderstood was an admirable quality.

Now, in the futuristic years of the 2010s, originality has become a liability. The internet has turned into a world wide popularity contest, mimicking the neoliberal free market with likes and pluses and numbers of followers.

You have to be successful now, popular, or you don’t exist. It’s a strange notion to me. In my mind success is a sure sign of mediocrity. I guess I’m getting old.

We are not a commercially motivated studio. We are driven by artistic curiosity and a sense of obligation to explore a new medium on the one hand and create art that is relevant to our age on the other. But we have no interest in leaving the potential impact of our work solely up to chance. We want to reach as many people as possible. The fact that we know that only a small minority will actually enjoy what we make, makes this all the more important.

Since the major peak in sales is always at the launch of a game, it makes sense to attempt to maximize that peak. Not only for the sales on those days, but for the exponential effect on the rest of the sales of players spreading the word. The more sales a game has at launch time, the more it will have per day throughout its life time.

The few more artistic games that have done well commercially, all had extensive periods before launch in which people would be talking about the game. Sometimes this “hype” lasts over a year, before the game is released. A similar thing happens in the AAA sphere: games are talked about a lot a long time before they come out, and as soon as they have, the talking stops, the game disappears from the discussions.

Given this phenomena, it would make sense to sit on Bientôt l’été for a while before we release it. This is completely counter-intuitive. I’m eager to share my work with the world. But if I do this too early, apparently this world will be very small. I don’t mind as such, since Bientôt l’été is, strictly speaking, not a commercial game. But I think we should do our best to reach the biggest audience possible. If only to get the biggest possible amount of response, to inform our further evolution as artists and designers.

One could say that the “hyping” can already start now. In order to reach maximum potential by launch time. But that’s not how things seem to work in the indie sphere. Talking about a game only really takes off when the game looks and feels finished, through screenshots, videos and even playable versions. Anything else simply does not spread very far. And given the organic way in which we create our work, a representative version of Bientôt l’été will only exist on the day that it is finished.

I doubt if we will have the good sense to wait when the game is ready. It will have been a very long time since we published anything new. Surely we can all wait a bit longer. And yet, I can only imagine how eager we will be when Bientôt l’été is done.

Have you noticed how in almost all science fiction movies, computers are operated exclusively through keyboards? Instead of using a mouse, future people just rattle on the keyboard. I presume this is because it makes them look more like hackers.

Something similar may happen in Bientôt l’été. I want at least the main part of the game to be completely controllable with only the keyboard. There’s also going to be things that can be done with the mouse (especially the multiplayer part -the conversation at the café table) and perhaps I’ll throw in a gamepad interface. But you’ll definitely be able to begin playing the game by only using the keyboard.

The game starts with traveling through space, to the space station. So typing your way through the first few scenes, might enhance the feeling of being in a space craft, operating the mouseless computers of the future.

Sometimes, there are buttons on the screen that you can click. But you can also simply type the corresponding key on the button (a letter or an arrow). Next to the button there’s text explaining its function, in the language chosen by the player. It will be your own choice to navigate using the keyboard or not. Much like you will decide yourself how far you will travel in space, before you start playing -the first scene of the game is potentially endless: it generates planets and solar systems as you continue to fly through space.

There’s something very nice about controlling a game through the keyboard alone. In a way it feels more intimate, perhaps because of the association with writing. A mouse feels like an extension of the arm. As a result it keeps things at arm’s length. The cursor should feel like a fingertip but it rarely does. And in a game where you control the entire body of an avatar, mouse control, somehow, doesn’t make much sense.

PS: Only while proofreading this post do I realize how very appropriate a keyboard interface is for a game inspired by the work of a writer.

It may seem a bit redundant to have an avatar in a game while expecting the player to consider that character to represent him or her. If the player is going to be this main character, why not use a first person point of view?

The main reason in Bientôt l’été is to evoke a sense of touch.

Touch is the one sense that is sorely missed in our multimedia experiences. We can do without taste, and we may even be thankful that designers cannot use smell. But the lack of touch is often frustrating.

Technology has tried to make up for this lack somewhat with haptic feedback through vibrating controllers. And in first person games, we are all familiar with the bobbing camera when walking and jerky camera motions in response to the effects of violence. But the suggestion is never really convincing.

The thing that works best, in my mind, to suggest a sense of touch, is just showing the touching. It would be very difficult to suggest how the wind feels in a first person view. But when you can see how the clothes and hair of a character on screen are pulled by the wind, you get the idea. And if this character is supposed to represented you (because you can control it), then it’s not hard to imagine actually feeling this. Or at least conjuring up a memory in your imagination to what that feels like.

In the exterior, single player part of Bientôt l’été, you control the avatar through pretty standard third person navigation. The main activity in this part is collecting items that are washed up on the shore by the waves. Since these items are on the floor and sometimes quite small, they are not so easy to spot. Especially not if the avatar is obstructing your view. They may see the object, but you don’t because they are standing between you and it.

I would find myself always approaching things sort of sideways, rotating the camera around looking for items on the beach. And then it dawned on me: why don’t I just move the avatar to the side, so they’re not in my line of sight?

I had had this idea before, for the new version of 8. But the reason for using it there is to give the player the feeling that they are with the character, as a different person, symbolically holding her hand. That is not what I want in Bientôt l’été. The man or woman need to really be an avatar for the player, to navigate the holodeck through, not another person.

So I made a compromise.

While you’re walking, the camera slowly moves to the side. You hardly notice it, but it does allow a view of what’s ahead. The only tricky part is to snap the camera’s rotation center back to the avatar when turning around it and changing direction. Otherwise the camera makes annoying off center orbits. But it’s working fine. It adds a slightly spinning, sliding feeling that actually goes well with the dizzying effect of staring at the waves float in over the sand.

Coding is easy. If you know what you want, you just type it in and the program is done. At least that’s how I felt today when transcribing my visual Universe graphs to Javascript.

But I also realized that being creative is not something I can do in code. Typing in all the logic felt like locking in it all down into solid concrete that can never change again. As if the code, fluent while typing, instantly solidified into an arcane amalgamation of symbols that lose their meaning to humans as soon as they leave the fingers and become the exclusive domain of the machine.

This is a fine method when you know what you want.

But knowing what you want is a bad idea when it comes to interactive creation. When advertising uses the phrase “the limit is your imagination” they mean that the possibilities are endless and anything is possible. But in my experience, when dealing with interactive pieces, my imagination is a very real limitation. If you only create the videogames that you can imagine, you’re not going to get far. You need to get dirty. You need to program. You need to make the machine come alive and collaborate with it, play with it. Interactive things should be made in an interactive way.

And that just doesn’t work in code for me. I need visual tools. I need blocks to position, links to physically connect. I cannot play in a word processor. Copy paste is not my idea of creative interaction. When I see all of my work, when I see the relation between the logic and the game on the screen, the effect of the systems that are running, then I start seeing new combinations, I get ideas that go much further than my imagination.

Not just in the sense of “wacky ideas”, but in the much more useful sense of ideas that can actually be built. When you listen carefully to your game, it will tell you what it wants to be. It’s a bad idea to ignore that. And this sort of communication works so much better in a language I can comprehend.

Thanks to Antares Universe, I am programming again. Universe is a visual programming add-on for Unity3D. I have been using it virtually exclusively to program our prototypes and games since several months. Thanks to Universe, I have been able to get my hands dirty again with actually programming, with actually expressing ideas for interaction and procedures in working logic. As opposed to battling with the Javascript syntax checker and hurting my head trying to think of linear text as a way to represent non-linear logic.

When I’m programming in visually, all mistakes I run into are mistakes I have made myself. Logical mistakes, oversights, etc. As opposed to the constant struggle with logistics that is coding in script for me. Universe allows me to get my work done.

And more than that. The way in which a visual programming language lays out the logic, inspires me too be more creative. Looking at some dead text with odd characters is meaningless to me. But seeing the living graph light up while my programming is running gives me ideas.

Bientôt l’été has been entirely programmed visually. Until today.

I decided to have a closer look at the strange hiccups I was hearing in the wonderful music Walter Hus has composed for the game. And sure enough, my Universe graphs were the culprit. In Unity’s profiling tools I noticed regular spikes that were identified as something mysterious called Garbage Collection. When I turn off the graphs, the spiking stops. The average framerate of the game is fine, but the spikes in performance mess up the music.

When I transcribe the visual logic to scripts, the problem does not occur. So the fault is not with my programming. Once again, my creativity is being mangled by engineering flaws. I love computers, I adore what we can make them do. But they’re so sensitive, so weak. The slightest thing that happens out of the ordinary, throws them off. You have to be so terribly careful with them. Careful in a way that only obsessive engineers can be. How am I supposed to make art with this thing?